


Love and Friendship

by alamerysl



Series: Unfinished Dragon Age Snippets [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, POV Solas, Snippets, unfinished work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 02:18:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12878082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamerysl/pseuds/alamerysl
Summary: Love is love, regardless of the form it takes.Another snippet I unearthed and was encouraged to post.





	Love and Friendship

Love is love, regardless of the form it takes.

Solas loves Ellana Lavellan as he never thought he would ever love. She carries the burden of the Inquisition with remarkable grace, remains steady and true in the midst of bigotry and prejudice, and shows the world just what a “knife-ear” can do. She is lithe and slender, delicate and ethereal, swift and light-footed. The vasillin marks her has June’s, and Solas hates himself for enjoying how the spirals and loops and broken Elvhan glyphs only enhance her beauty.

Ellana is an eager student, always ready to soak in his stories of the Fade and the traditions that the Dalish try to carry on. Solas does his best to moderate the scorn in his tone, and if she notices the slips, she does not say anything.

Ellana is a delightful surprise in the world he ended up destroying, almost enough to make him believe that the world is something worth saving, worth preserving, flaws and all.

But she is not the only one.

Evelyn Trevelyan is a rare creature. They are both apostates in the strict sense of the word, but the differences in how others react to them is astounding.

Oddly enough, it has very little to do with the fact that he is an elf and she is a human. A mage is a mage, regardless of sex or race, and mages are equally hated and feared.

Solas meets Evelyn because she and the future Inquisitor are thrown in the same jail cell under the same suspicion of murder of the Divine Justinia. Wrong place, wrong time for the shemlen, whose foolishly soft heart compels her to heal and aid a stranger in pain.

Solas is not prone to friendliness but there is something about Evelyn that brings his walls down. Her enthusiasm for knowledge and openness to new concepts endears him to her almost immediately. If she were not so kind, Solas would have kicked himself for falling into a trap. As it is, Evelyn has no desire to take advantage. She seeks knowledge to satisfy her curiosity, to help others, and because she enjoys conversing with him.

She is a friend where Solas never thought one would be needed or appreciated. He cannot help the respect he has for her, treating her as an equal worthy of a (false) god’s love.

Desire he may the Inquisitor, lust after her he does, and conquer and ravish her he will, but Solas knows deep down that he will never find Ellana worthy of the same respect and deference. She is beautiful, the epitome of elven beauty, but her growth is so stunted. Her magic is flimsy, a mere drop of the ocean that it should be. Her ignorance is outstanding and her desire to correct it is nonexistent. A painful shadow of a once great, powerful empire.

In his darkest moments, Solas wonders what he is doing with a creature like her. In Arlathan, Ellana would not even be considered worthy of the lowliest of slave markings, and her beauty would have defined her future. Sometimes he thinks he is chasing the shadows, the after-impressions of what he knew.

When he fights the urge to push Ellana down to her knees where she should belong, Solas seeks out Evelyn’s presence.

His friend is typically cozied up next to Dorian, who is yet another aggravating shemlen, made even worse for his Tevinter heritage, and yet something close to a friend as well. He seeks her out and instigates a debate that Dorian often is dragged into, and the three of them argue past dinner into the dawn and collapse, utterly exhausted but completely satisfied.

He loves her, his strange human friend. He had thought his heart would not bear to destroy Ellana’s world, but he finds instead that the strongest pull is to ensure that Evelyn never looks at him with devastated, betrayed eyes.

One day soon, he will tell her everything. He will tell her who he truly is and what he has done and present himself for judgment by his quickling.

“Okay,” Evelyn drew out uncertainly. “You’re Fen’harel, the misunderstood Elven god whose name is cursed by the Dalish. You gave the orb to Corphyeus-“

“By accident!”

“By accident, and accidentally unleashed its power, which became attached to the Inquisitor’s hand.”

“Yes, but I must stress that I did not mean for Corypheus to take the power as his own. I was simply too weak to unlock it and gave it to someone I thought would help.”

“Right,” Evelyn said, for lack of anything else to say. So her cool hobo mage friend was actually a misunderstood Elven god in hiding who somehow had the worst plans ever. “How old are you? If you saw the founding and collapse of Elvehan, that’s at least several thousand years!”

“I estimate my age to be somewhere between 10,000 to 11,500 years,” Solas replied stiffly. So far Evelyn was taking this much more calmly than he had hoped, and certain much better than Ellana could ever do.

“Wow, you’re a very well preserved senior citizen, then. Don’t look a day over a thousand.”

Solas felt his hands touch his face unbidden, and flushed at Evelyn’s teasing smirk.

“Really, Solas, I’m kidding,” Evelyn said with a small laugh. “You look like an elf just entering middle age. You’re still very pretty.”

“Evelyn,” Solas said in exasperation, turning away to hide the red flush in his cheeks.

“Should I call you Fen’harel?” Evelyn asked. “Is that a title or a name you adopted? Or is it the one you were born with. Who are you, really? Solas or Fen’harel?”

“I am always Solas,” he replied with a frown. “Fen’harel was an insult given to me by the Forgotten Ones, one meant to shame and humiliate me. Instead, I took it for my own and wielded it with greater efficiency than they could ever hope to do. It is the name I eventually became most well known by. But I have always been Solas, falon.

“Other than my identity and the need to conceal it, I have never lied to you.”

“I know, Solas.”

“You do?”

“You’re my friend. No false friend would tolerantly put up with me and Dorian trying to replace Bull’s horn balm with lube and then hide us in his room when Cassandra was on the warpath for almost disrupting what could have been an important alliance.” Evelyn smiled fondly at the memory. “It almost worked, too, if Sera hadn’t decided at the same time to stitch flowers onto all of Bull’s spare eyepatches.”

Solas rolled his eyes in exasperation. “I do believe the three of you were sufficiently punished and sent to your quarters without supper.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about!” Evelyn flopped onto an armchair that was always cleared off for her. “If you really were an evil god biding his time to implement your plan of doom and destruction, you wouldn’t need to put up with our antics, or play along at all. Instead, you’d just become even more of a hermit, rarely emerging from your dusty little cave.”


End file.
